Irish development squad named in bid to emulate GB and Australia success

Action from this year’s Junior Tour (Photo: Stephen McMahon)

Cycling Ireland has named sixteen young riders on its new Talent Team 2020 squad.

Such was the demand for places on the panel that the association has decided to establish a separate development team for young female riders.

There are no riders from Dublin clubs in the line-up announced today.

The selected riders – from U12 to U16 – all applied to Cycling Ireland for inclusion after applications were sought earlier this month.

The leaders of the project are Cycling Ireland’s development coaches Martin O’Loughlin and Paddy Doran.

Both are very familiar names, having raced at elite level and focussed in recent years on coaching developing talent.

O’Loughlin’s son, Michael, has enjoyed considerable success in recent years at underage level and is one of the riders included in the new development line-up.

The Talent Team 2020 concept will aim to engage talented youths with the national set-up and nurture them through to international level at junior ranks.

The process is seeking to mirror development programmes in nations like Great Britain and Australia, where talent has been identified at a very early age and is now yielding spectacular results at junior, U23 and elite levels.

Cycling Ireland said Talent Team 2020 was being established to smooth the transition “of our brightest prospects born in 1995 from the youth to junior ranks, where they will then hopefully join the junior development programme” already in existence.

The second goal is to identify “Ireland’s most talented cyclists born in the years 1996 to 1999 and offer them specialist support to achieve their potential along a high performance development pathway”.

The eldest of the riders selected for Talent Team 2020 will be 25-year-olds when the Olympics are held in 2020. The youngest of the riders will be 21-year-olds in that Olympic year.

The first meeting of the team will take place at Winning Solutions in Dublin on Saturday 29th October, from 11am to 4pm.

Fresh from her exploits at the UCI World Track Masters Championships in Manchester, Orla Hendron has been asked to assemble a selection of female riders. They were to be included in a mixed gender Talent Team 2020 set-up, but given the level of interest from girls, Cycling Ireland has decided to establish a team specifically for them.

We’ll keep you posted of the selection process for that one folks.